Graeme O’Driscoll

The rise of “consumerism” has changed the world. People are no longer satisfied with simply accepting vanilla market offerings – they want choice.

The same can now be said for the data and telecommunications market. As the industry continues to grow, capabilities and capacity improve, costs come down and competition in the market heats up, consumers and corporate customers want to have the freedom to find the solution that offers them the most value.

The rise of open standard technologies was the first major step in removing the restraints imposed by vendor lock-in, and the demand for this level of flexibility has now spread to other sectors of the industry. To heed the call for increased openness and freedom of choice, providers need to embrace a telcoagnostic approach to their data centres.

There is a perception among many big hosting service providers that a telco-agnostic approach will lead to higher customer attrition rates. This was a major concern for the mobile network operators (MNOs) when number portability was introduced into the market. It meant MNOs no longer had the lock-in associated with changing contact numbers, when the hassles outweighed the cost benefits of doing so. However, the introduction of number portability forced the MNOs to differentiate their services on a number of different levels, including quality, reliability and price, and today very few people have actually ported their numbers.

It is with this same principle in mind that a hosting service provider should view telco agnosticism. This approach will create flexibility for customers, as it gives them the power to choose the network with the best mix of price, quality and level of service to break out of the data centre and give them access to their hosted environment. This is a bold move, and will cause providers to work harder in all areas of business and provide an industry leading end-to-end solution and level of service that will sustain customer loyalty. The great thing for the market is that if customers don’t feel that this is the case, they now have the ability to change.